sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Mass notification system

I have a customer (hospital) that is looking for some type of system that can be activated to call up to 50 phone numbers to make an urgent announcement. They don't all have to be made at one time, maybe ten at a time. It is to provide them with a means to contact all mission-critical personnel in the event of an emergency. It needs to offer tiers of priority, maybe ten notifications per level meaning that if it's a priority one call, only ten people are called. Priority two means twenty people and so on.

Viking has something that will do this but the units will have to be daisy-chained in order to accommodate this volume. I was hoping for something a bit more sophisticated. Their voice mail system is capable of doing this, but only one call at a time. We need something that can do 5-10 calls at a time, then do the next, etc. Any suggestions?

My company does predictive dialer software. We have a few customers who use it for small-scale notification as well.

I'd think the usual questions would apply:
How much? How fast?

The hardware required would be a PII or better workstation with either ISA or PCI slots and a Dialogic D/41SC (ISA) or D/41JCT (PCI). There are a couple of these on eBay for less than 500.

Our software shouldn't be terribly expensive either, though I don't deal with sales stuff at all.

I don't know what they use but that's like what volunteer fire departments do. The system would call the first group of people and when answered it would give recorded message of fire location. If more people were needed dispatch would call second group etc. If no one comes up with answer I'll check with my fire dept.

We have several churches that use a Key Voice voice mail with telemarketing module that will call as many simultaneous ports as you have available or allow in software. They use this to notify members of an illness, death, etc. Works pretty cool. Check to see if can use a similar feature in a stand alone voice mail. These guys have about 200 plus numbers in there database to call.

Thanks guys. I was hoping to get something that's just hardware and not a PC due to the caliber of the people who will be using it. They really aren't bright and anything computer-managed would surely be suicide for me. We really don't want to spend the money on a complete voice mail system since they already have one, but all it really does is notify one destination upon message being left. If it's not answered, then it cascades to the next, etc. That takes too long.

We need to be able to simultaneously dial out to about 4 people at a time until all members of the list have been reached, and they should be reached within ten minutes. Like I said in my original post, Viking has a dialer that will do what we need to do, but it just seems to be a bit cumbersome when we have to link several together to accommodate the ultimate party count.

Merritt, the volunteer fire department system is kind of what I think we need. More information would be great.

Rob, it would be great if you could pass our requirements on to a sales person at your company and have them contact me. It's time for the rubber to hit the road with this appliciation, so we need to come up with some kind of a solution soon.

I appreciate all of your input!

Whatever happened to the old fashion phone chain? You call 5 people who each call 5 people who each call 5 people ..... what could be faster or better then that? Sometimes it seems technology ain't the answer to it all. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Mark

Thank you, Mark. I couldn't agree with you more. These are big-city people who think that they need big-city communications and hey, if they want to write the check, I want to give them what they want.

I did some work on one of these units in our local Emergency Management Agency (911). I can contact them for details if you want. Theirs is integrated with their mapping software to call within a certain radius of a given point. Really customizeable software features.
Bill

I checked with the fire dept and that system is no longer used. I asked a LEC guy and he said it was some type of multi phone ringdown supplied from the phone co. I have a call into the senior CO tech who should remember I'll let you know if I learn anything else

That fire dept. is a good example. They will pay to put this stuff in and in a year nobody there knows how to use it and it becomes a "what's that" bolted on the wall.
I have the same opinion of headsets in a small business. They say "I really need one because I'm soooo busy" after they have to plug and unplug a few times, it ends up living in the bottom drawer.
Mark